He apologised for being off camera. He was on babysitting duty, feeding a bottle to a five-month-old, and he’d do the interview one-handed if that was alright.
It was alright. It also turned out to be the most honest framing available for the whole conversation, because almost everything Alec Kremins said over the next forty minutes was about doing two things at once and admitting when one of them isn’t working.
A year ago he was laid off. Weeks later a venture capitalist he had never met sent him a message. Seven months after that, a very successful founder told him his idea was the worst he’d ever heard. He checked the numbers, agreed, and killed the product he’d raised money to build.
Four months later, RallyUp is profitable.
This is a story about a founder who stopped pretending — in public, at speed, with a newborn in the house.
Why This Is on Sherman
Same disclosure we made with Jordan Winston and Rachel Fiegler, because the rules shouldn’t move when the story is good.
RallyUp is not an Israeli startup in the way this publication usually means it. Its clients are mostly American. And — his word, not ours — it’s an agency, not a product company. We asked him directly how he wanted it described. “Let’s say agency.”
It’s here for three reasons.
One: Kremins made Aliyah alone one month after October 7, and has built this company from Modi’in ever since — he was raised in New York, but he’s been Israeli for the entire life of the company. Two: he ran, on himself, the exact go-to-market playbook that Israeli founders keep paying consultants to teach them badly — and we can trace the money it produced. Three: he killed a venture-funded product and said so out loud, which almost nobody does while it’s still happening.
There’s also a fourth reason, and it’s the one that made me want to publish. Asked whether he was happy, he didn’t talk about revenue.
42 Days
The date is exact, and he offers it without being asked.
“On August 4th, 2025 — a little over a year ago — I was let go from beehiiv after they let go of like half their marketing team.”
Not performance. A layoff that took half a department. He’d been leading partnerships globally there, after a first job out of college on the go-to-market team at Ramp.
What happened next is the entire company in one sentence:
“And right away, started posting on LinkedIn about what I wanted to build. Got an inbound message from a VC that I didn’t know.”
The VC was a man named Eric, a partner at Lightbank — the Chicago firm founded by the Groupon co-founders. He messaged that same month. Kremins had planned to bootstrap. Instead he raised a pre-seed, structured as four SAFEs, with a first tranche landing before he had built anything at all.
He’d rather not publish the total, beyond that it was under a million dollars. A second cheque came from Alex Oppenheimer, an investor he describes as a friend.¹
He posted about it as fired to funded in 42 days, and the hashtag became a newsletter.
Forty-two. The answer to life, the universe and everything, per Douglas Adams — and, it turns out, to what happens when you post about getting fired.
Now hold that sequence up against the product he sells today. A man with no job posts about an idea, and a stranger with a fund finds him and wires money. That is the demo. It happened before the company existed, to the founder, using nothing but a LinkedIn account and the willingness to say out loud what he wanted.
Everything RallyUp charges thousands of dollars a month for is contained in that paragraph.
“This is my exact story. I’m dogfooding the exact product. I was able to raise money, I was able to close big logos, I was able to hire. Almost every week or every few weeks, I close a client just off of my content.”
The Worst Idea Ever
Here’s the part that didn’t make his own marketing.
RallyUp v1 wasn’t an agency. It was software — a platform for what the category calls EGC, employee-generated content. Get a company’s whole staff posting on LinkedIn, at scale, systematically.
He got the idea honestly. He’d watched it work twice.
“Both companies I saw did EGC — getting their employees posting on social. They did an amazing job of that. And that’s really what inspired me to start building RallyUp.”
The product started as a competition — leaderboards tracking which employees posted most, ranked by impressions, with a plan to let them monetise it. Then it became clear the employees couldn’t actually produce the content, so an AI generation layer got bolted on top.
He worked on it for seven months. Multiple iterations.
Then a conversation.
“He said: you have the worst idea ever — because it seems like a good idea, but in practice it’s really a bad idea.”
The man who said it was, in Kremins’s description, a founder with multiple exits. In his own LinkedIn post he calls him a tech billionaire.²
His reaction is worth quoting in full, because it’s the least defensive thing a founder has said to me all year:
“And I realized he was right. It’s like when you go to work out and the treadmill is on a 10 incline. It’s going to be a really hard road.”
Then he went and looked at the data, which is the part that actually matters:
“I saw the activation rate was really low and customers weren’t happy and there was high churn.”
His post-mortem has two parts, and the first one is the good one:
“It’s mostly cultural. It’s very hard with a piece of software to come in and get your employees posting. Most companies either have it or they don’t, if it’s embedded into the culture of the company. And software can’t sell for culture.”
The second: activating a meaningful percentage of any given team was going to be brutal, and the contracts he was closing against marketing budgets were small.
Low activation. Unhappy customers. High churn. Low ACV. A cultural problem wearing a software costume.
He killed it around April 2026.
The beehiiv Control Group
The most useful thing in the interview is buried in a follow-up question: if EGC doesn’t work as software, why did it work at beehiiv?
His answer is three mechanisms, and not one of them is product on its own.
It came from the top. “The CEO, Tyler Denk, is very active and builds in public. So he kind of sets the tone and sets the culture.”
They hired for it. “They look for people who already are posting a lot and have a lot of social visibility. So it’s like chicken or egg.”
And they made it a ritual, not an incentive. Not money — a weekly shout-out at all-hands for whoever stood out on socials that week, plus a gift card.³
That’s it. Tone from the founder, a hiring filter, and a small piece of theatre every Friday. You cannot ship any of those. Kremins spent seven months and a chunk of a pre-seed discovering that the thing he’d watched work was culture the whole time, and culture doesn’t have an API.
Which brings us to the sentence he wrote about it afterwards:
“He was right about the product but wrong about the thesis. The real product was the context system underneath it, not the employee activation layer on top.”
The engine that understood a person well enough to write in their voice was real. The dream of switching on four hundred employees at once was not.
So he kept the engine and threw away the dream.
What He Sells Now
RallyUp today takes over an executive’s LinkedIn. Founders, CEOs and execs, mostly at funded companies. Strategy, positioning, ICP targeting, audience building, and all of the writing.
Pricing is a monthly retainer per executive, in the thousands, with a minimum initial term and occasional flexibility for earlier-stage founders. He doesn’t publish a rate card and didn’t want one printed here.
Client input arrives through structured interviews once or twice a month, which the content team mines for raw material. Output is text, usually with an image. No video.
“Our head of content has 17 million impressions on LinkedIn and 50,000 followers, and he’s responsible for all the content quality.”
That’s roughly two and a half times Kremins’s own following, working inside a five-person shop. It’s also the correct answer to the only objection that matters in this category, which is who is actually writing this.
The client list runs from seed — “we work with a few pre-seed, but seed is usually the earliest” — up to Airwallex, the payments platform that raised $320M in June at an $11 billion valuation on roughly $1.3 billion in annualised revenue. PandaDoc is on the wall too. The sweet spot, he says, is Series A to Series C.
Acquisition has been inbound and referrals. They’re only now starting ads. The waitlist that appears on the site turned out to be real capacity — they opened slots again after hiring another content person.
“Distribution is the moat nowadays, and storytelling is really what differentiates founders and companies, because tech is largely commoditized. It’s never been easier to build, and it’s really hard to craft distribution.”
“Content has become cheap. Now anyone can create content with AI, and that’s why everything is full of slop.”
The Question He Didn’t Dodge
Every case study on RallyUp’s site is measured in impressions. The pitch promises pipeline. I asked whether anyone has traced actual revenue back to a post.
He gave the best answer available, then immediately undercut it himself:
“With Airwallex, we just started working with them. And within two weeks, I think we got six calls in the calendar. And one opportunity was a $10 million client.”
“It’s sometimes hard to track the exact effect, because attribution in B2B marketing is difficult.”
And on the honest state of the evidence:
“It’s still early. It’s been three months. Content takes time to turn into authority, and then authority takes time to turn into pipeline. So it’s not immediate.”
Honest Math
He won’t give a client count — “I’d rather not give specific numbers” — and he’d rather we didn’t print his rate. Fine. There’s still a business to describe.
Confirmed: profitable, a team of four plus a new content hire, a per-executive retainer well above what the category typically charges, and a stated goal of $1M ARR within three to six months.
At that price point, a million in ARR doesn’t require many clients. It requires a couple of dozen executives under retainer at most — and not a couple of dozen companies, because he notes most clients start with one exec and roll the service out across the leadership team, so a single logo can carry several seats.
Which makes the target genuinely reachable and also tells you exactly where the constraint sits. Every one of those posts is hand-written, by a content team you can count on one hand. The waitlist wasn’t a growth-hacking flourish. It was arithmetic.
For a five-person shop in Modi’in with under a million raised, a million in ARR at agency margins is a good business. It is not a venture-scale outcome, and those are two different things, only one of which requires an apology.
The Agency Question
Which is the obvious objection, and to his credit he’d clearly been chewing on it before I asked. His answer has two parts and both are worth taking seriously.
Part one: the category changed.
“The agency model has actually changed, and it’s scalable now, more scalable than ever before with AI. In fact, Y Combinator and Sequoia both put out pieces about AI-powered agencies and how they’re both starting to look at and invest in those. So I think you can get SaaS-like margins and you can get scalability from agencies that you couldn’t have gotten before.”
Part two — and this is the sophisticated bit — he priced the round so he wouldn’t need a miracle.
“I picked very specific investors and I raised at a very specific valuation where I wouldn’t need a moon. If you go and raise a $5 million pre-seed at a $20 million valuation, you need to exit for, I don’t know, a billion dollars for it to really move the fund. But if you raise at a much smaller, healthier valuation and a smaller amount of money, that changes the math a little bit.”
He’s still building product behind the service — there’s a product person on the team and proprietary content tooling in the works — and he’s still, on the record, aiming at a sizeable exit. But when I pushed on whether an agency can carry venture expectations, the answer arrived in ten words:
“I would rather have a profitable agency than a dying SaaS.”
That sentence is the whole strategic argument, and it’s the kind of thing founders usually only say privately, after the second drink, about someone else’s company.
Whether it’s a thesis or a very well-constructed rationalisation is a question readers can weigh for themselves. What’s not in dispute: he was losing money on software and he’s making money on services, and he changed course in month seven rather than month thirty. Yuval Karmi went from $15.5M and 21 employees to zero before he built something that worked. Kremins made the same call with a lot less to unwind.
The Israel Part
He’s Israeli. He lives in Israel. The Israeli logos are on the site. I did the obvious arithmetic and got it wrong, which he sorted out in one sentence:
“It’s mostly US. But we’re trying to break more into Israel. We have a handful of Israeli customers, but right now it’s mostly US still.”
So the Israeli market isn’t the book of business — it’s the next one. Which is more interesting than what I’d assumed, because the gap it describes is real and currently unfilled. Israeli B2B companies raise, announce a US go-to-market push, and then their technical founders — the people with the most credibility in the room — stay quiet in the one channel where American buyers are actually paying attention. Kremins knows that buyer from having grown up among them, and he lives here. If he can’t sell into that gap, it’s worth asking who can.
He made Aliyah alone in November 2023, one month after the attack.
“Because Israel is our home. And I always had a plan to come to Israel, but I was definitely not going to let October 7th stop me from coming here. And it’s one of the best decisions I ever made.”
He met his wife here about two years later. She’s a hydrotherapist, currently on maternity leave. The baby is five months old. They live in Modi’in, which he recommends, and which I have still only ever seen from a train window.
Emuna
The last real question I asked was whether he’s happy. I expected a sentence about the pivot working.
“Thank God, I’m happier than I’ve ever been. And you know why? Because I’m in a strong place right now with my Emuna and my Bitachon — that Hashem controls everything and Hashem runs the worlds. Because I am a Hasid of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, and I follow his path and realize that everything comes from Hashem. So that’s why I’m happy, no matter what’s going on in the business.”
That final clause is doing an enormous amount of work, and it’s coming from a man who had just spent twenty minutes describing killing his own product.
He is not, to be clear, coasting. Asked whether the publicised seventy-hour weeks had eased now that he has a team and a newborn:
“I’m trying to balance it a lot more… but I could tell you, I’m working harder now than I’ve ever worked in my entire life.”
He plays piano and guitar. He listens to Ishay Ribo and Yaakov Shwekey. He describes himself as more boring since becoming a father, which is the correct answer.
And then, asked what nobody ever asks him:
“Block out the noise. There’s so much noise around you, and you’re going to want to compare yourself to so many other people and their success and their trajectory. A lot of people I know look at me and say, wow, look at how much this guy has accomplished — raised money, the company, the growth. But I still have my insecurities, and everyone has their insecurities. And I look at other people and I feel badly about myself. Just block out the noise. Just compete with yourself.”
I asked how he actually does that.
“I need to remind myself every day and sometimes I struggle. But religion helps me. It says in Pirkei Avot: who is a rich man? Someone who’s happy with his lot.”
Yeah, you heard right. A guy whose entire business is manufacturing visible confidence for other people, telling you that he looks at other people’s feeds and feels worse about himself. He knows exactly how the machine works. He built it. It still gets him.
There’s a version of this piece that ends on the ARR target. This is the better ending.
He’s spent fourteen years failing at companies — the website at 14, the school app at 16, the NFC thing at 19, the caffeine gummies at 22, and then the software he raised money for and shot in the head at 27. His own summary of what that adds up to:
“If you’re on attempt 2 or 3 or 5 and wondering whether you’re behind, you’re not. You’re collecting the pieces. The picture just doesn’t make sense until the last one clicks.”
Somewhere in Modi’in there’s a man working the hardest he ever has, on his fifth attempt, feeding a bottle with one hand and telling you he’s never been happier — and meaning it in a way that has nothing to do with the revenue.
We’ll check back at a million. 💜
Fast facts: RallyUp
What is RallyUp? A LinkedIn content agency for B2B founders and executives, founded August 2025. It takes over an executive’s LinkedIn end to end — strategy, positioning, audience building and all content production.
Who founded it? Alec Kremins, 27. Raised in New York, made Aliyah alone in November 2023, based in Modi’in. Previously go-to-market at Ramp and global partnerships at beehiiv. Fifth venture.
What does it cost? A monthly retainer per executive, in the thousands, with a minimum initial term. No published rate card.
Who are the clients? Airwallex and PandaDoc are the named logos. Seed to Series C, sweet spot Series A–C. Mostly US, a handful of Israeli. Client count undisclosed.
What did it raise? A pre-seed across four SAFEs, under $1M total, from Lightbank and investor Alex Oppenheimer. No Crunchbase or PitchBook entry exists.
How’s it doing? Profitable. Five people. Targeting $1M ARR within three to six months.
Contact: rallyup.team · Alec Kremins on LinkedIn, where he responds personally — which is, after all, the entire pitch. Tell him Sherman sent you.
Notes on the numbers
We publish what we can verify and label what we can’t. The honest ledger for this piece:
Investor details are incomplete. Kremins’s lead investor was identified in conversation as “Eric, a partner at Lightbank,” without a surname. Alex Oppenheimer’s investment vehicle wasn’t pinned down and is unconfirmed.
The “tech billionaire” is unidentified. Kremins described him as a founder with multiple exits, and in his own LinkedIn post as a tech billionaire. He didn’t name him and we didn’t press. We’ve left him unnamed here rather than guess.
The beehiiv weekly social award’s name is garbled in our recording and has been described generically. If beehiiv wants to correct the record on the format, we’ll update.
RallyUp’s traction figures are founder-reported. Profitability, team size, the $1M ARR target, the Airwallex result and the head of content’s audience numbers all come from Kremins directly. Normal for a private company at this stage — we’re flagging it, not doubting it.
The “couple of dozen executives” estimate in Honest Math is Sherman’s, not a company statement.
RallyUp has no entry in Crunchbase, PitchBook, CB Insights or Tracxn, and no prior press coverage in any outlet, Hebrew or English, that we could find. Searches for the name return RallyUp.com, an unrelated Tucson fundraising platform. As far as we can establish, this is the first substantive third-party coverage the company has received.
The company’s own website still carries copy from the v1 era, including metadata describing an outbound and ABM offering that no longer exists. We read this as pivot debris rather than a live claim, but it’s there.
This piece is based on an on-the-record video interview conducted 21 August 2026, plus Kremins’s own published posts and newsletter. Per agreement, he reviewed the draft for factual accuracy before publication. Editorial judgment, analysis and all uncharitable readings are Sherman’s alone.